Good morning, Chicago! Yesterday was completely lovely; the weather warm but not hot. Brian had to work, so I went and had brunch with a couple of friends, one of whom accompanied me for a nice wander around the neighborhood afterward. We got mani-pedis (and, for the first time ever, I managed to keep from smudging mine), and I took her to my recently-discovered favorite salon for an appointment. Yay for girly days! And now my finger- and toe-nails are precisely the same shade of orange-red as my hair.

As of today, I'm in a strange sort of limbo. I was originally supposed to be going to Detroit this week to help with more survey administration, but due to some bureaucratic argy-bargy (apparently two weeks is not enough time for Detroit Public Schools to run a background check) they had to send someone else instead. So now my schedule for the next several days is unusually bare.

This morning, at least, that turned out to be a plus. We woke up to discover a very bedraggled Leo looking shamefacedly up at us. At first we thought he'd taken a dip in his water fountain, but when I wandered out into the kitchen I found the counters and floor turned into a beautiful abstract oil painting. (Brian had been deep-frying chicken pieces last night and left the oil out in a bowl overnight to cool. Which, in all fairness, he normally does without incident.) Mop, drugstore for baby shampoo, bathtime, in that order. Now someone just needs to clean the kitchen up. Guess who's been elected. (Brian held Leo in the bathtub - fully clothed - while I poured water on them, and still got several scratches for his trouble, so really, it's only fair.) Meanwhile, Leo is furiously grooming all the water out of his fur. I predict a massive hairball or two later.

As it happens, I'm still going to the Detroit area on Thursday. Originally I'd been planning to go and visit CJ and Amanda and John the weekend after survey administration, but since that didn't work out, CJ offered to buy me a train ticket. I'm actually moderately excited about the prospect; I haven't yet been on Amtrak, and I'm quite fond of trains. And anything that means less time dealing with TSA is perfectly fine with me.

Mood-wise, there's been a lot of up-and-down recently. I wonder if the lack of yoga is part of it; I applied for CorePower's yoga-for-trade program and got back a generic "we'll let you know if there's an opening at a location near you" response. A month ago. I'm honestly wondering if I should just find a darn part-time job so I can pay for it; I still think their studios are way overpriced, but the improvements I saw in strength and mobility when I was going regularly were...marked. Not to mention how it always improved my outlook and emotional state. Sigh.

Still, I've had a good week now where I haven't been turning into Grumpy Cat every few minutes, and I'll take what I can get. I'm even playing the guitar again! I'd been doing it sporadically for several months, and then for a month or two I wasn't playing hardly at all. But I'm actually excited about it again, which hasn't been the case for a while now. Been thinking about making a video or a recording. Say it with me, folks: we'll see if anything comes of it.

The weather is beautiful today too, if warmer - approaching thunderstorms seem to love pushing the heat ahead of them. I suspect that after lunch I may put on shorts and sunscreen and wander down to the lakeshore with an ice cream bar.

We have no Internet until Thursday, so I'm tapping this out on my phone. Apologies to anyone I've not responded to; I'll have a better connection soon.

We made it! And without any major mishaps, either, despite the fun of maneuvering a 16' Penske truck through crowded city streets. (I took the bus at one point today and came away with nothing but respect for the city's drivers; I can only imagine the constant stress and hassle of piloting a vehicle that size in a city this complex and congested. Mass props, CTA.) The most Type III fun part was unloading the truck; strange how loading it (from a single-floor house with five+ people working together) was so much less work than unloading it (with three people into a second-floor unit). I don't think any of us have properly functioning legs today, especially where stairs are involved.

Today's mostly been unpacking (Brian managed to get nearly the whole kitchen done) and errands (the aforementioned truck-wrangling - fortunately a cross-country trip had been enough to give Ian a very good idea of the truck's handling characteristics, and we returned it without any problems and only a few circuits of the lot trying to figure out where we were turning in). The cats have been fairly unimpressed with the whole deal, but are slowly settling in. Utilities are now in our name. Internet is set to be connected Thursday. We need a bed of some description - we ordered a new mattress, which Amazon graciously delivered to us the day we moved in (hurrah for the free trial of Amazon Prime!), but right now it's just on the floor. We may see if any of Brian's local online connections have a truck so we can go to IKEA, or we might just deal with it for a bit. We'll see.

Mostly, I'm just grateful that we all got here in one piece. I think it's still sinking in that this is our actual, permanent home now. Not that it's anything to complain about - the unit is quite nice, on a very pretty street in a nice neighborhood with plenty of stores (I walked to the grocery store to get stuff for dinner! For the first time in my life!) and restaurants (There's a Subway just down the street! And all sorts of awesome local places!) right nearby. Just...I've wanted to live in a city for so long, and I'm so used to showing up in one for a week or so and then leaving, I think it's going to take awhile to convince myself that I'm here for good.

Tomorrow we're going to check out the Field Museum, and also the newly-opened branch of the awesome coffee shop we found when we were here last. They had a sign up saying they were looking for musicians at the other location; maybe I'll ask and see if they're looking at this one too. That'd be convenient, as it's all of a half-mile away. Speaking of which, I'd best get back to practicing. I think I've managed to get the guitar out...twice? During this whole project? Bad Rose. No treats until you've got proper calluses again.

They're not quite 100%, but I have enough strength and dexterity in my left fingers to properly play again. And my middle finger, which was stiff enough to be problematic on some chords, seems to be back in business. There's more than a little practicing and rebuilding endurance ahead, especially with the three-hour gig coming up in a couple of weeks, but I don't care - I can finally play again!

Also we're moving to Chicago.

It's been an...eventful week. Some frustrating things have happened, but some awesome things have too. I'll definitely take that over the "nothing but frustrations" kind of week, but it does mean I can't in good conscience write a ranty "why did this week happen to me" post. Which makes me a bit grouchy on its own. Grumble.

To begin at the beginning, last Saturday Brian and I were coming back from the Farmer's Market when our car went "bing" and gave us the engine-overheating warning. We popped the hood and discovered the coolant boiling over (even through the sealed cap); given the balance of evidence (it's an eight year old car with 109,000 miles on it) we figured the water pump had given up the ghost. Hardly unexpected, but it turned out to be particularly bad timing. Most weeks we could probably have gotten by with borrowing Brian's work truck (the grocery store is right by his work, and we could have begged rides from friends to/from our mechanic's in Sierra Vista), but this particular week he had a flight to Albuquerque to catch. So that added a couple hundred bucks' worth of rental car to the bill, on top of the towing to Sierra Vista and the pump itself and labor to put it in. Unsurprisingly, that ended up more or less emptying out our emergency fund.

On the other hand, I had a nothing-but-pleasant experience with the rental car company. There's a small Enterprise franchise just a block from my mechanic's; I'd never used them before, but have friends who have nothing but good things to say Enterprise. So I wandered down there and told them "I need to rent a car, probably for about a week?" They were very flexible, and while (unsurprisingly) their least-expensive cars were all rented out, they offered me a Prius for the midsize price (just under $200 a week with tax), which I was happy to accept. Even better, the employees were all competent and polite (surprising, for Sierra Vista) they didn't try to upsell me on insurance/a GPS/roadside assistance/the other eighty billion things Hertz and the others have all tried to push on me. Needless to say, I was pleased.

I also rather enjoyed driving the Prius around. It definitely didn't have the most hamsters on the road (accelerating up the hill from Old Bisbee onto Highway 90 was a bit of an adventure), but it got us all over southern Arizona with no problems. I've heard some people say the cockpit is too strange for them, but I found it to be quite intuitively designed, and really liked the heads-up display with info like the battery charge level and your per-trip mileage. Also, the sound system has improved immensely; I remember test-driving one back in 2007 or so and being rather miffed at the tinny sound quality. This one had a perfectly respectable stereo and a USB connection to my music player, to boot. (Yay for built-in touchscreen controls without having to futz with your phone! Yay also for charging and audio through a single cable!) And the entire week's driving, which included multiple trips to Sierra Vista and back, a trip to Tucson and back, and a not-insignificant amount of driving around Tucson, cost me all of $35 in gas. (By comparison, a similar amount of driving in our BMW, which gets excellent gas mileage for its age and class, would've cost nearly twice that.) It occurred to me that if I were doing the professional-musician thing (driving around a lot for gigs and lessons and such), it would be a strong contender for the perfect car - lots of room for gear, not too expensive, economical on gas. If only a professional musician's income weren't so frustratingly inconsistent from year to year, and even month to month.

Wednesday came around, and Brian and I got up at 4:00 AM to catch his 7:30 flight to Albuquerque. The story behind this is a little convoluted, but the short version is this: back in May, he had several phone interviews with a network information and security firm in Chicago. Obviously we were pretty excited about this, as we've both wanted to move to a proper metropolitan area for a while, and while Brian's current job with the County isn't awful, its opportunities for advancement were fairly limited (and he'd just been turned down for a pretty significant one). Unfortunately, after several phone interviews, the folks from this company disappeared for a month - and when they resurfaced, they had him talk to someone in Albuquerque about what sounded like a drastically different position. (And in the meantime, Brian had been offered a non-traditional advancement path with the County, doing much more of what he liked, with more money involved too.) The Chicago folks asked him to come to Albuquerque to meet them in person, though, and while he had a lot of reservations about them (as we've already done the "move across the country to a job with people who can't keep their shit together" thing once, and it was a near-disaster), he figured it couldn't hurt to meet with them and ask what was going on in person.

Apparently things went rather better than he expected; not enough to erase all his reservations, but enough that we're adopting a "wait and see" attitude, pending what they offer him. Obviously we're both a little torn about the idea. On the one hand, things are definitely looking up here; he's getting to do some awesome (and awesomely resume-building) stuff at his job, and I'm starting to make connections with folks in the music community here. But on the other, the fact remains that opportunities for both our careers are ultimately pretty limited in this area. Which doesn't mean that saving for a couple of years before moving wouldn't be a good plan, especially as we've just had to empty out our savings. But depending on whether he can negotiate a significant relocation bonus with them...and back and forth it goes. (And that's not even getting into the more emotional aspects of "I want to live in a city, goddammit" and "I never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss snow and rain.")

Meanwhile, since he was leaving early and coming back at 11:30, I decided to book us a hotel room in Tucson for the night so he wouldn't be driving back after a nineteen-hour day. Thanks to it being summer in Tucson, I managed to nab us a room at the Wyndham Westward Look Resort for about $100 (including resort fee). Gorgeous place - quiet, beautiful xeriscaping, great pool area, super-friendly staff (I hardly felt snooted at once!), spacious room with a bathroom larger than some apartments I've seen. I doubt I'd stay there at the full rate, especially in the busy season, but in Brian's words, "I've stayed in way crappier places for a hundred bucks a night."

Conveniently, while I was killing time down on 4th Avenue, I also discovered that Sky Bar was having an open mic that night. (Convenient because they're right next to a late-night pizza joint Brian adores, and I'd promised to bring him some when I picked him up from the airport.) So I put on my awesome Nordstrom's maxi dress (awesome because it looks great, packs easy, and I got it for $3 thanks to various discounts) and a bit of makeup, grabbed Kalia, and showed up a couple of hours in...only to discover that most people call ahead before the night even starts and all the slots were full. However, the emcee (who went by the entertainingly Regency nomenclature DJ Odious) took pity on me when I told him it was my first open mic, and managed to slip me in for a couple of songs while a Mexican ska band set up behind me. (In contrast to his name, Sir Odious was a fantastic emcee - excellent at tech, good at putting the performers at their ease, and encouraging and helpful to newbies like me. Mass props.) I was fairly nervous, but I think I at least put in a respectable performance. At the very least, I had the undivided attention of a few folks up by the stage - and in a bar environment, "undivided attention" is about the best compliment you can ask for.

Picture, compliments of the aforementioned Sir Odious:



Incidentally, I'm glad he had me go before the Mexican ska band, because holy crap. They were amazing.

The night at the hotel/obligatory Costco trip/drive home were all pleasant if uneventful*. Friday I did my usual busking after yoga class; it turned out to be my best day so far financially, bringing in nearly double my prevous record (two $5 bills, woo! plus assorted singles), and some wonderfully heartfelt compliments. And later that afternoon Brian and I drove down to Sierra Vista, dropped off the rental car, walked to our mechanic's shop, and picked up the BMW.

At which point I apparently decided two weeks was far too long to go without a physical mishap, and tripped over a concrete parking bollard and fell, scraping up my shoulder and spraining three of the fingers on my left hand in the process.

My fretting hand.

In the words of Kvothe, possibly the literary patron saint of musicians (and craftspeople, and pickpockets) everywhere...Tehlu spare my hands.

The good news is nothing seems to be broken (I can move all my fingers and I don't have that bone-deep ache that signifies a fracture somewhere), so our financial situation isn't any more precarious. The bad news is, as I discovered when I sprained both my ankles a few years ago, soft-tissue injuries are tricky and hard to predict in terms of healing time. It might be a week, it might be three or four, depending on the severity of the sprains and how good I am at keeping them immobilized. And I have a gig in a month to practice for, dammit.

So that's been my week. How was yours?

*ETA: Though at Costco I did find a fantastic 18-year-old Scotch for $32, as well as a book I'd been wanting for $9. Which both chalk definitively into the "good" column.

The paid gig is officially set. They've even paid me already - more than a month in advance! - which surprised the heck out of me. (If my writer friends' experiences are anything to go by, getting paid for one's art is generally a much tougher thing, sometimes even when it's offered. Not that I'm complaining, mind.) If you're in town on the 7th of September, come take the garden tour; I'll be hanging out at 123 Clawson Avenue and singing my heart out.

Speaking of my heart (as in something I've set it on), I've decided on my dream guitar. When I was at Rainbow Guitars last, I played a rosewood-and-spruce Taylor Grand Orchestra, their biggest body size. I'm not sure I even have words for the richness and complexity of the sound; rosewood is notorious for its full deep bass, but the size and shape (and Sitka spruce top) helped bring out the midrange and trebles beautifully. I almost want to say I was intimidated by its volume and sound quality, but that's actually completely the opposite of what happened; from the first strum, I knew I had to sing with it. And I did, and it was the most magnificent experience.

I don't want that exact model; the abalone purfling around the outside ("purfling", the term for the decorative trim around the edges of an instrument, is my new favorite word) is a little too blingy for my taste, and the vintage-style brass tuners don't really do it for me either. But like all guitar manufacturers, Taylor will happily do custom orders, with any or all the options you might want. If I can find a design that I like, I'd love to get a rose-vine inlay on the neck and perhaps a matching rose on the bridge. Obviously I don't have a specific price point, but (based on the cost of the 918e) I'm going to guess it'll be in the $6000 range. So that's what I'm saving my music-making money for. It makes for a nice goal - unnecessary enough that there's no rush (at my current average of about $6 a week it'll take me, oh, twenty-odd years to save up that much) but something I'm passionate enough about that it's a motivation to improve. Not to mention that, by the time I can afford it, I should be able to play well enough to deserve such a beautiful instrument.

Meantime, I'm enjoying tooling around with my other two lovely guitars. The last couple of Fridays busking have been a bit cash-poor, but I've amassed a few 'fans' - Bisbee around-town regulars who always come by and listen when I'm playing, despite probably having my entire repertoire memorized by now. Oddly gratifying, that. I also went out and played for an hour by the library in Sierra Vista while I was waiting for an oil change on my car; not exactly the most appreciative audience, but none of the sour-faced retirees who wandered by chewed me out like I was half-expecting, and a couple of kids dropped some change in my hat. (One kid was all "I don't have a dollar, but here, I've got a bottle of water" - in the desert and while you're singing, arguably an even better tip.) And today, since I needed to go downtown for work anyway, I brought my travel guitar and played for a couple of hours afterward. For the first hour, I thought it was going to be a complete bust - I had nothing other than the seed money in my hat and almost nobody was listening. But then a couple of my regulars showed up (one of them even went "Oh hey, I was actually working today, so here" and gave me a couple dollars - awww!), and there was a bit of afternoon traffic, and by the time my fingers gave out I had $10, a bag of mint, and only one mosquito bite (hurrah for remembering bug spray this time). So I came home and had a shower and made myself a mojito. Not a bad day, all told.

There are times, like yesterday, when I find myself idly leafing through pictures of you. And I get to some of the pictures from a few years back, and I look at them and think "My God, she was so young." And I am confused because I don't remember you ever being that young. You had always been so mature and confident and.... not this girl I'm looking at. I can see you in her, though, and I marvel at what she will one day become. It's like cupping a seed in the palm of your hand and seeing the flower curled up inside it, waiting. --cyrano

It seems almost a self-congratulatory point to start at, but my friend's comment frankly captures my own sentiments, too. I've long since come to terms with the fact that my present self, while seeming confident and collected and smart, will seem painfully out of touch and naive five years from now. But it's also nice to think that in those five years I'll have grown enough to feel that way about my consciousness now.

For a long time (so long that I can't even remember where I first read it), my favorite metaphor for the aging process has been that of the Matryoshka doll - each year adding another layer, but all of the previous layers still contained within. And while that still seems accurate, if somewhat imprecise, I find myself wondering if it's more along the lines of a continuum - where future versions of yourself exist, and perhaps even have an effect on, your current self, just as your past ones do.

Bah. This is what I get for waiting until 10:30 the night before my birthday to finally try to write a post. Metaphysical musings that probably don't make much sense. Perhaps I'd best stick to the 'past in review' model, then.

In retrospect, twenty-eight (especially the latter half of it) was something of a crisis year for me. As with so many things, it seemed to stem largely from my sense of identity, or lack thereof. I'd had little luck finding a career-type job here in Arizona, I'd dabbled in various artistic endeavours but never long or deeply enough to properly consider myself an artist, I wanted desperately to write but couldn't seem to motivate myself to do so regularly. I had few friends in the area and none that needed any particular kind of help or support. I had little luck finding opportunities to sing; even karaoke opportunities were practically nonexistent. So that left...being a wife. Which, while pleasant, was hardly in line with how I saw myself, and certainly not without its own frustrations.

I very nearly made some drastic changes in my life then, borne less out of a logical progression of "this is the problem and these will fix it" than "everything else is crap and if I blow the rest of it away at least I'm starting fresh". I've done similar things in my life before. But while it was a close thing, probably closer than I'd like to admit, I'm a little bit proud of myself. Because instead of blowing up my life, I made a deal with myself that I would try to find less drastic and more-likely-to-directly-help ways of solving my problems.

I bring this up for two reasons. One is that it illustrates a theme I've returned to several times in my birthday posts - that I actually rather like getting older, because I learn things like the self-knowledge to recognize a destructive pattern and the patience to create a plan to work through it instead. And the other is that today was my deadline, of a sort. At the nadir point, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking "I'm nearly thirty. What am I going to do if I hit that point and things are still this awful? Do I really want to be thirty years old and have no sense of my own identity?" And I thought, "Well, that's a year and a half away. If things haven't gotten better by then, thirty seems as good a time as any to clear the slate and make a fresh start."

But they did. (They got better by my twenty-ninth birthday, thankfully, and have continued to improve.) And I won't. And I'm very grateful that I was/am old enough and smart enough to avoid that pitfall. Even if it took me nearly three decades to learn.

On that subject, I don't think I can overstate how much picking up guitar has helped with all of that. I have an identity now (and I'm starting to reach the skill-level where I don't feel like a total poseur in referring to myself as a "musician", either). It's given me a complementary skill to practice singing against. And I've finally found a pursuit that, while enthusiasm ebbs and flows as with any hobby, it's constant enough that I don't find myself setting it aside for months or years at a time.

It helps that I'm good at it, too. Not great - I have a long, long way to go before I come anywhere near that point - but good enough to impress my guitar teachers, my friends, and even some of the people who wander by while I'm busking. Good enough that I can look at the tab to "Diamonds and Rust" and go "Well, that'll take a while to learn, but I'm certain I will learn it, eventually." Good enough that I can play a song I remember my mother playing and singing to me when I was very young, and hear her singing through me - me, who never felt like my voice would match up to hers.

Things are not perfect, nor will they ever be. But they are much, much better. And I have far more joy in the present and hope for the future than I did then.

As "turning thirty" goes, I think "joy and hope" is a pretty good note to hold, don't you?

Between the lack-of-work situation and some fairly large expenses that have cropped up recently (hello, medical bills that go so far beyond ridiculous as to be sublime!), I'm starting to seriously look at my options with finding another job, even just a low-paying part-time gig. Thing is, it's nearly the end of tourist season here, so I doubt many folk will be hiring, and I don't always have the transport to get to Sierra Vista. (Not to mention exactly how much the gas costs inherent to a 60-mile round-trip commute eat into your part-time paycheck.)

It's occurred to me more than once that I could take up busking - I have a (small) repertoire at this point, and God knows I could use the performing practice. I also have a list of reasons not to - or really, excuses - about a mile long. It's getting to be hot outside. Tourist season is almost over. There aren't that many people around anyway. I wouldn't make enough to make it worth my time. I can only play about half an hour before my chording hand starts to hurt. I only really know maybe five songs well enough to perform. If I got bored of them and tried something new I might make mistakes in front of people. Hell, I might make mistakes on the ones I do know. Not to mention people might laugh at me for busking with a $1400 guitar.

I think it was my mother that told me once that the best road to achieving your dreams was to take the course of action that made you think of the most reasons not to do it. If that's true, I should be making a livable wage on my music...oh, about three days after I start busking. :P

Coming home from Tucson late Saturday, Brian looked at me and asked, "Have we really gone from having one guitar that we never play to having seven, most of which we play regularly? Within a year?"

Strangely enough, we have. Admittedly, a couple we don't play much - Mary Jane's a little too big for me to play comfortably, and Kalia's much nicer-sounding anyway; and Brian traded for a 12-string Ovation because he wanted to try playing 12-string, but didn't end up liking the feel of that particular one. But the 12-string Eastwood we got him for his birthday he plays regularly, along with (of course) his Les Paul. And in addition to Kalia, with some help from the wonderful people in my life, I managed to scrounge up the cash for that GS Mini I was eyeing. So I don't have to feel guilty for taking up 2/3rds of the overhead bin when we go visit Brian's mum in April.

Tucson was a fun day - we went to the Festival of Books for the first time. (I'd meant to go last year but hadn't managed it; I nearly didn't go this year but at the last minute checked the list of guest authors and realized Patrick Rothfuss was going to be there. Given that he's one of my favorite authors, and that I've a full set of first printing hardcover copies of all his books so far, this meant we were definitely going.) Somewhat entertainingly, the weather was cold and drizzly all day; the poor booksellers were spreading tarps over their wares and the guest authors got none of Tucson's much-vaunted lovely winter weather. Still, though, it was a fun trip - Mr. Rothfuss was a thoroughly entertaining individual, both in person and as a panelist. And he was most gracious about signing all four of my hardbacks plus a paperback I bought from the booth hosting the signing (as it only seemed gracious to support their shop).

After wandering around there and attending a rather interesting panel on gender roles in fantasy, we went down to Rainbow Guitars in the hopes that they'd have the guitar I wanted - a Taylor GS Mini, the only travel guitar out of the many I tried that didn't sound like a travel guitar at all aside from perhaps being a little weeny on the bass. I got their last one, in fact; apparently they normally keep a few in stock as they're quite popular, but it had been a busy Saturday. The popularity, at least, is understandable; this particular guitar's a really nice balance of features, being compact and lightweight and inexpensive (for a Taylor) while still very good quality and with nearly a full guitar's worth of sound. Plus it comes in a very nice thick-padded soft-shell case with backpack straps. The guy at Rainbow, in recognition of the fact that we'd been in there a number of times, even gave us 10% off the price, which made it slightly less than it would have been online with no tax. Score one for developing relationships with one's local retailers.

Then we went to Feast, with the intention of eating for (nearly) free on the remainder of a gift card a lovely friend had bought us. Instead we ended up paying for dinner and using the gift card for a bottle of amazing Scotch they introduced us to. It ate up the rest of our restaurant budget for the month, but still. Totally worth it.

Is it weird that I find myself wanting to write a blog post about a day where nothing much happened?

Normally I would have been working yesterday, but things have been so slow at the gallery lately (thanks, most likely, to the weird-ass weather - seriously, we woke up to another couple inches of snow on the ground this morning. Pretty, but not exactly a big draw for the tourists) that C decided to just have me in on Thursday this week. So, upon finding out that Brian was going to be driving out to do some work on a tower just over the border in New Mexico, I asked if I could come along.

I was in a very strange headspace all that day. I'd been dreaming all night about being in airports - not going anywhere, exactly (I only remember actually getting on a plane once), but just sort of wandering through them with my guitar, sometimes playing, sometimes just watching people. And that in-limbo feeling seemed to carry over into the day; I spent much of it sort of half-there, half-zoned-out. But hey, if you're going to be zoned out, there are worse things to stare at than the landscape around the Arizona/Mexico/New Mexico border. We even drove up into the Chiricahua Mountains by Portal, intending to go over them and get back to Bisbee through Willcox and Benson, but the pass ended up being closed (probably due to ice and/or snow - see above re: weird weather). Still, we got to see how things are coming back after the Horseshoe Two fire a year and a half ago, which was reassuring. The sky island forests are so unusual for Arizona climate and weather, and so beautiful.

And really...that was it. We came home, I had a nap, I finished the book I was reading and wrote up a review for it on GoodReads, I played my guitar a bit. Not a very interesting or accomplished day, but an oddly pleasant one nonetheless.

I don't think I've mentioned it more than tangentially here, but I've been keeping a sort of unofficial list of daily goals in a spreadsheet on Google Docs. Things like doing yoga, exercising in some manner that raises my heart rate, practicing guitar, stuff like that. There's no real reward associated with doing well at them over a particular day/week/month (other than a nice line of Os in the associated line or column), but it's a nice way to keep track of how I've been doing on the whole.

I'm thinking about adding a goal for writing in there, too. I've been encouraged by the success of my approach to guitar - one of the ideas that really encouraged me was that getting good at something didn't require hours and hours of time on a given day so much as consistency in giving it a little bit of time, every day (or nearly so). I've given guitar, on average, fifteen minutes a day over the past eight or nine months, and while I'm certainly not as good as I would be if I'd practiced an hour on each of those days, I've made pretty significant progress. So maybe I should try something similar for writing. Given the amount of improvement between my NNWM 2010 and 2011 output, despite almost no practice between the two (and even if the latter is still nothing resembling publishable), it seems likely that daily practice would have a pretty good effect.

I found a sticker recently, that I had initially intended to send to a friend, but it sort of made its way onto my guitar case last night - I'm not sure exactly why; it just felt right there. It certainly feels apropos, given recent events in my music career:



So I think I'm going to sign off here and place my feet somewhere useful. Like on my yoga mat in extended-side-angle pose. Or on the floor, sorting out laundry. Or in the kitchen to make a pie.

And maybe I'll write something today, too.

I love Kalia's sound and I've been enjoying playing her, but I'd noticed that the action was unusually high on the lower frets (in lay terms - the strings were farther away from the frets than normal, making it rather difficult to play). This hasn't been a serious issue for me personally, as I'm hardly skilled enough to be regularly shredding away on that part of the neck, but it's been on my "get it looked at" list for a while, so today I took her in to the local music shop for a neck adjustment.

Much to my dismay, the adjustment was only able to reduce the problem slightly - and the tech showed me a couple of places where the neck was measurably uneven. He said he could probably get it closer to playable if he replaced the bridge, but since I'd just bought the guitar (for $1300, I might add) he recommended checking out their warranty service to see if they'd cover replacing the neck.

So I went to Takamine's website to see about calling them up for warranty work. And apparently I can't even call them directly (especially odd - they had numbers up for their UK and French divisions but none for the US or Canada); I have to find an "authorized repair center" and call them, and they have to call Takamine and get an RMA and all that. Although I am, of course, still on the hook for shipping the guitar back to Takamine.

The best part? There are three "authorized repair centers" in Arizona. The good news is that two of them are in Tucson. The bad news is that they both appear to be individual dudes working out of their homes on a "by appointment" basis. Not exactly confidence-instilling.

And I sit here and look at the fact that Emerald City Guitars has dropped the price on that used Gibson Songwriter Studio I was eyeing, and I wonder if maybe I shouldn't have held out a little longer...